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Show PRIVATE LAND CLAIMS 111 promptly reported as worthy of title and confirmed by Congress.77 The Houmas claim or claims had equally chequered careers, and their records are scattered through the journals of House and Senate committees, the courts, the General Land Office, and a number of manuscript collections. John Slidell and Judah Benjamin almost won confirmation for a greatly amplified claim of more than 200,000 arpents by a seemingly innocuous measure they slipped through Congress in May 1858. When its application to the Houmas claims was learned, there was much excitement among the 500 squatters on the backlands of the claims who were themselves influential in Louisiana politics. A bill was rushed through Congress to repeal the obnoxious confirmation.78 In the adjudication of the Florida claims, abundant evidence of fraud in the form of antedated and forged documents turned up and, when it was fully evident, the courts voided the titles. There were, however, some instances where evidence of fraud was not made available until too late, since the higher courts declined to receive new evidence. It was also a grave question whether the courts had not approved claims that had been properly signed and dated but which had been beyond the power of the Spanish officials to grant; others were approved by the courts which one of the ablest authorities on Spanish claims declared would not have been confirmed by the Spanish. Still others- mill grants-won approval at least in lower tribunals even though under Spanish law they, like other inactive grants, would have been declared null and void.79 If the courts "9 Stat. 597; S. Ex. Doc, 32d Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 4 (Serial No. 661), No. 4; Act of June 29, 1854, 10 Stat. 299. 78 Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st sess., App., p. 561 and 36th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 2674, 3178, 3282; Acts of March 3, 1859 and June 21, 1860, 11 Stat. 442 and 12 Stat. 866. 79 Richard K. Call, summarizes much of the history of the granting procedure under Spanish rule in erred in deciding early Florida claims, as Richard K. Call has suggested, those errors multiplied in later cases where the courts rested their decisions more or less on the earlier questionable ones. Thus the Arre-dondo decision confirming 289,645 acres in Florida in 1832 was used handily, though not in a primary way, to aid in confirming the somewhat dubious 10-league California claim of John C. Fremont in 1854. In turn the Fremont decision was an important factor in the confirmation of other claims about which there was much doubt and some opposition on the court.80 Despite increasingly liberal treatment of claimants in Missouri, Louisiana, and Florida, as late as 1858 there were still many outstanding claims which for technical reasons had not been finally determined. In some cases the United States had permitted settlers to enter quarter-sections and if the original claims were to be finally confirmed, it would clearly be most unwise to eject the settlers. An Act of June 2, 1858, sponsored by Missouri Congressmen, attempted to meet this situation by confirming the rights of the claimants to the amount of land within their claims and to allow them "certificates of location" or scrip "equal to that confirmed and unsatisfied." The surveyor general of the district in which the claim was located was to determine whether all or part of the land had passed to others and if it had to issue the scrip ("surveyor general scrip") for the quantity of land unsatisfied.81 Florida and offers some disagreements with the Supreme Court in the interpretation of Spanish land laws and practices under them in American State Papers, Public Lands, VIII, 249-96. 80 31 Stat. 689 ff., and 33 Stat. 721. 81 11 Stat. 294. Among the Louisianans' or their estates gaining confirmation of large tracts by the Act of 1858 were Daniel Clark, Julien Poydras, Bernard Marigny, Dominique Bouligny and John McDonogh. Judah P. Benjamin for the Senate Committee on Private Land Claims reported the reasons for the gap in adjudication in Senate Reports, 35th (Continued on page 112) |